Shelfari

Shelfari is a social cataloging website for books. Shelfari users build virtual bookshelves of the titles they own or have read, and can rate, review, tag, and discuss their books. Users can also create groups that other members may join, create discussions, and talk about books, or other topics. Recommendations can be sent to friends on the site for what books to read.

Shelfari was launched on October 11, 2006. In February 2007, Amazon.com invested $1 million in Shelfari, and moved to acquire it a year later in August 2008.

History

Shelfari was founded by RealNetworks alumni Josh Hug, Kevin Beukelman, and Mark Williamson under the name Tastemakers Inc., the former two being software developers and the latter never joining the company full time. The site sought to create a social networking service that met the needs of avid readers. This strategy may have mirrored a trend during this time period of creating niche social networks such as social movie site Flixster. Once Shelfari received its first equity fund raise in early 2007 and moved to acquire it a year later in August 2008., the company grew to five employees, including software developer Kevin Durdle, designer Timothy Gray, and VP of marketing Dave Hanley. In August 2008 the company was acquired by Amazon.com, also a Seattle, Washington company, and the team was integrated into the book technology group. Shelfari continues to function as an independent book social network within the Amazon.com family of sites.

Features

Shelfari promotes its "virtual bookshelf" as one of its main features. The virtual bookshelf displays covers of books which the user has entered, with popups to show the user's book information (review, rating, and tags). Sorting by author, title, date, rating, or review is available to the viewer of the shelf. Users may organize books into different shelves, including already read, currently reading, planning to read, wish list, currently owned, and favorites.

The Shelfari catalog may be edited by users, though some changes must be approved by Shelfari "librarians." Using wiki functionality users may edit each book's authors, title, publication data, table of contents, first sentence, and series. Users may also combine redundant books into a single entry or add new titles not found in the catalog. Similar to books, author pages may be edited or created. In addition to general catalog maintenance, users are encouraged to contribute reviews, descriptions, lists of characters and settings, author biographies, categories, and descriptive tags.

Most books in the Shelfari catalog come from the large Amazon catalog, including Amazon Marketplace listings added by independent resellers. These books link back to Amazon and display current pricing and links to Abebooks for used book sales.

Criticism

Shelfari has received bad press for its "Invite Friends" page. Jesse Wegman, writing in The New York Observer in October 2007, complained that because he had "accidentally failed to uncheck the approximately 1,500 names in my Gmail address book that Shelfari had helpfully pre-checked", the system caused invitations to be sent, contrary to his intentions but "ostensibly" from his own address, to his entire network of contacts.In November 2007, Shelfari was accused of astroturfing by Tim Spalding, the creator of LibraryThing, a competing social networking book site. In a comment on another blog critical of Shelfari (primarily criticizing the "invitations" system), Josh Hug, the CEO, blamed the astroturfing on an intern not knowing better, and said that it had stopped.